Is school about providing a foundation for a good job or a good life?
Photograph: Steve Debenport/Getty Images

Summer ends as the children go back to school with their new pencils sharpened, ready to jump or be pushed through the endless hoops that are required of them. Some of them like school. Some of them don’t, but school is not only the place where they must acquire skills for “the real world” but one that has to meet many complex emotional needs. As Educating Cardiff, indeed all of these series have shown, school is about a lot more than getting them to hit targets.

Pastoral care is a euphemism for the incredible range of issues that teachers are expected to deal with, from abuse to trying to school kids who are basically carers. What matters, though, is that they sit in rows, learn by rote and don’t violate uniform rules. That way A*s lie, and A*s are what matter. If you want something a little more creative, get thee to a private school, or you can dabble in the free school movement, parts of which are spectacularly unravelling.

As ever, complaints emerge from the “worried well” of parenting. Now it’s about children born in summer. Why make them go to school at just more than four years old? They are too small and not ready, and suffer educationally as a result. Look at Scandinavia, where kids start at six or seven, and are all the better for it. Well, yes, and I know teachers won’t like me saying it, but for some of us, school is free childcare. We have to work.

One of mine could not really manage to hold a tray when she started school and went round the playground with her coat over her head. It was heartbreaking.

So if you can afford to keep a child at home, then great, but as ever, such debates seem to preoccupy those whose kids are already advantaged. The first two years are what matters. Whether you read to your child matters. Those kids turning up at reception at five with extremely limited vocabularies, unable to dress themselves, and who have never seen a book, are the ones we need to worry about.

To build more flexibility into the system is undoubtedly good because each year it becomes ever more rigid. Tests and targets now mean children are fed bite-sized lumps to regurgitate in exams and are given precise rules about how to write their prose, which are faintly ridiculous. To complain that creativity has been squeezed out of the curriculum is nothing new, but it is part of a worldview that insists that work is good and play is bad.

Bizarrely, the work ethic must be instilled very early just as the work ethic is changing. Work is valuable and playing is time when you could be working. Really? So little kids trot off to school, while bigger ones have to get up ever earlier while the start of the school day gets pushed back. Experts tell us that teenagers need more sleep and are not getting enough, but sleep is seen as wasteful. Certainly the Thatcherite hangover remains, when people boasted of “power showers” and “power breakfasts” and how they could function on little sleep. We now do this to our children. While sleep deprivation is a form of torture, it is now also profitable. I mean: how many apps can you buy that tell you that you are not sleeping enough, or getting the wrong kind of sleep?

Sleepy teens and little children are now sent off by exhausted parents to prepare for “the world of work”. Are we too tired to think about what that world will be? What is the endgame of institutionalising children from four to now 18, and telling them that these are the best days of their lives? It is a massive denial of what work is and what work will be. Not every job will be done by robots, but all predictions say about 40% of the workforce will be automated in the next 20 years. In some highly skilled sectors that figure is higher. So we are looking at the automation of many jobs, and we already see a blurring via technology between the worlds of work and leisure. Somehow we should be helping our children navigate some autonomy. Instead, we are turning out automatons that do well in exam factories.

As the future arrives at an ever more accelerated pace, education policy becomes more retro and punitive. More tests. More exams. More uniform. More uniformity.

Is school about providing a foundation for a good job or a good life? Do we know the difference? Despite the overwrought sentimentality about letting children be children and not allowing early sex education, it is now de rigueur to stuff them into uniforms at four and basically tell them to put away childish things and get the sums out.

No one wants to prepare them for a world of non-work, no one wants to let them play, although as Einstein said, play is a huge part of productive thought. The work ethic is our religion. As for letting them have a lie-in in the mornings, who knows where that might lead? They might dream.